Conferencia invitada: Examining the Returns to Investment in Science: A Case Study

Jacques Mairesse

Using detailed transaction level data from a small highly selective university for the period 2000- 2010, we estimate the links at both the grant and PI levels between public research funding and research output in terms of quantity and quality of publications, as measured by their numbers and the average impact factor of the journals in which they are published. Aggregating to the PI level our estimates at the grant level, holding total funding constant, we find more grants to be associated with more articles but articles of lower average quality, clearly suggesting that the way grants are bundled matters and that there is a quantity quality trade-off. A series of robustness analyses confirm that these results are qualitatively strong. Since they concern the scientific productivity of highly successful researchers at one of the US’s top research institutions, we can in particular reasonably conjecture that the quantity quality trade-off would be even more pronounced in other research institutions.

Jacques Mairesse is Professor of Applied Econometrics of Research, Innovation and Productivity at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Maastrich University and Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT (Netherland). He is also a Research Associate at the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique of "Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique" (CREST - ENSAE) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, USA). He is Inspecteur general honoraire de l’Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE). He is also president of the Comité d’Orientation Scientifique de l’Observatoire des Sciences et Techniques de l’Haut Conseil de l’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Supérieur (OST-HCERES). Jacques Mairesse has been engaged in many comparative studies, using firm micro data for France and the US or other countries, in particular to analyze various forms of investment in equipment, information and communication technology (ICT), organizational practices, R&D and innovation and their effects on productivity. His current topics of interest are in the economics of science and knowledge, with specific emphasis on performance evaluation at various levels of analysis and on interactions between individual and collective performance and contextual and institutional factors.